A Slice of London Pub Heritage

My trips to London often involve racing past the centre to get to a suburban Wetherspoon's or a Bexleyheath local that serves me Doom Bar and lasts one year in the Good Beer Guide.
So it made a nice change recently to stick around the Fleet Street area on a sunny day and visit some classics.

The next two posts contain:
➤ Pubs you've heard of!  
➤ Three three-star Historic Interiors!
➤ At least one treacherous staircase.
➤ Beer prices to bring me out in a cold sweat.

As we'd made our own ways to London by train and bus, I met Oxford CAMRA Chairman John in Chancery Lane for a spot of breakfast, before we made our way to the first pub of the day.

 

The Blackfriar (174 Queen Victoria Street, Blackfriars, London, EC4V 4EG)
The Blackfriar was built in 1875 on the site of an ancient Dominican friary.  It was remodelled around 1905 by architect Herbert Fuller-Clark who went to town with Arts and Craft and Art Nouveau styles within.  He employed sculptors to work with marble, wood and copper throughout the pub to create the elaborate rooms we see today.

I wonder if anyone at the time thought it was over-the-top and a bit gimmicky?
If Waxy O Connors in Covent Garden survives the next hundred years will folks marvel its 'heritage' interior?
Not everyone appreciated the Blackfriar in the sixties, when planners had the urge to demolish it to make way for brutal concrete blocks.  Poet Sir John Betjeman was one of the loudest voices campaigning against these plans, several years before the building was given Grade II listed status in 1972.

It's glorious in every direction you look, from the archways to the snug dining room at the rear, to the narrowing seating at the tip of the wedge.  The stained glass, marble pillars, the relief above the fireplace and the depictions of cheery friars having a whale of a time in copper above the bar, make for incredible surroundings.

 

The pedant in me wants to mention that it was the Franciscans, in brown capes (not the Dominican friars in black) that had a brewing tradition and were of a more jovial persuasion.  Black friars were very serious and studious and had little time for the frivolities depicted in the pub decorations.

The bar staff who served us had little time for frivolity either - service without a smile.
Myself and John both picked 'Pride' from the choice of 4 cask ales.  In good condition - just about - although not quite filling the glass to the brim when you're charging £7 a pint irks me a bit.

The Blackfriar is a pub that will always be worth calling in to regardless of the beer - £3.50 for a half pint a reasonable entry fee to marvel the exquisite interior.

Right...more wedge-shaped pubs, please!

The Cockpit (7 St Andrew's Hill, Blackfriars, London, EC4V 5BY)
This used to be my second closest pub when I was lucky enough to live in the narrow lanes by St Pauls at the end of the nineties.  Back then it sat next to an empty lot, never seemed to get very busy and served a so-so pint of Courage.  It was a heck of a lot better than Ryan's Bar on Carter Lane that my sometime flatmate used to insist on dragging me to, yet I only occasionally paid the Cockpit a visit.

An earlier building on this site operated as a venue for the unsavoury pursuit of cock-fighting until that was banned in 1840.  The venue then became a public house called the Three Castles, rebranding to disassociate itself with the prohibited gambling pass-time which still provides a name to many a pub to this day.  It got a Victorian re-build around 1865, providing us with the picturesque inn we see today.
By the 1980s, the original name was restored, the decorative gallery mimicking a layout where spectators would have gathered to watch the fighting cocks below.  

It's a glorious retro pub room, complete with trad carpet, bench seating, pewter mugs, and great old Courage livery above the bar.
It didn't stay as empty as in my picture for very long, local workers and tourists popping in to fill up the tables and choice vertical drinking spots on the alleyway to the side.
Two London brews from Southwark and Five Points, a 'Sussex Best' and Britain's best selling cask ale were on offer at the bar.

We both plumped for the Five Points 'XPA', a reliable crisp pale ale.  Served in good condition - a better good than the Pride had been in the Blackfriar, but not quite 'very good'.   If it hadn't been outlawed on the CAMRA scoring system it'd be a three-and-a-half!

As the lunchtime office workers descended on the sandwich bars, we strolled across Ludgate Circus onto Fleet Street and made our way to the Old Bell.

The Old Bell (95 Fleet Street, Temple, London, EC4Y 1DH)
Back in the days when Fleet Street was the epicentre of British newspapers, I suspect the Old Bell would have been smoky, boozy, and packed full on a Thursday lunchtime.  No artisan sandwiches required for lunch in those days.  It wasn't packed full on our visit: the staff completing a few cleaning tasks with just a couple of other customers in.  No chance of anyone leaving any top secret dossiers on the table next to us, as is said to have happened back in 1951. 

This current building traces its history back to 1678 when it was rebuilt following the Great Fire of London. It was once the site of Fleet Street's very first printing press, later becoming a pub of many names before settling on the Old Bell.

We found two handpumps ambitiously labelled 'Tap Takeover' serving Timothy Taylor brews, alongside Wainwright 'back soon' and the St Austell house ale.

Two halves of 'Golden Best' please.
The best bit of the pub is the front room next to the lovely lead stained glass windows.  You could almost imagine you were in the 18th century...  oh no, hang on.  You can't because of the generic dull 2020s pop being played with the volume a notch too high.  We settled instead at the rear of the pub with a view of St Brides church.

A hop, skip and a jump through the stationary buses on Fleet Street took us to the narrow alleyway leading to the Cheshire Cheese.

Olde Cheshire Cheese (145 Fleet Street, Fleet Street, London, EC4A 2BU)

Like everything in this bit of London, the Cheshire Cheese dates back to 1667, just after the Great Fire of London necessitated an awful lot of building work.  Prior to that it's believed to have been the site of an earlier inn called The Horn.
If you're looking for a roster of literary types as pub regulars, then the Olde Cheshire Cheese does rather well with Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Samuel Johnson all said to have popped by and drank here.

It's is a warren of rooms.  The wood panelled bar just to the right of the doorway is a dimly-lit delight of an olde worlde pub room, with a dining room to one side and two more spaces with a slightly more modern feel to the back.  Clamber down the staircase ("mind your head, John!") and there are three subterranean spaces under barrelled brick ceilings.  The cellars are said to date back to a 13th century Carmelite monastery (the white friars - I'm doing well with varieties of friars in this post).   

This is a pub where maintaining the 'no electronic devices' policy is challenging, with a procession of tourists popping in who - of course - want a picture of this slice of pub history.  It did seem the rules were loosely applied, with permission granted for us to snap a pump-clip pic.  I didn't have the cheek (or a good enough camera) to capture the ground floor rooms.
But I did get a photographic record of the challenging staircase...

And the beer?
The 'Old Brewery Bitter' from the wood was thoroughly enjoyable.  Didn't Sam Smith's used to be the bargain option in the capital, though?  That's definitely no longer the case.

We wandered a little further up Fleet Street until we reached another pub with 'Ye Olde' in the title.

Olde Cock Tavern (22 Fleet Street, Temple, London, EC4Y 1AA)
I haven't taken the best picture of the Olde Cock.  You need to be across the road to capture how narrow it is, five floors squeezed in between the neighbouring buildings.  Fleet Street was ridiculously traffic-clogged, so I'd probably have spent as long waiting for a gap to take the pub pic as we did in the pub itself.
Anyway, it's narrow, stretching back a fair way from the street with rooms across two floors.  The pub was relocated here in 1887, its previous location being on the other side of the road.

We perused the cask choices at the bar, dismissing the Theakston's 'Old Peculiar; as too disruptive to our ambitious itinerary for the day, then plumping for the Greene King house beer.
The familiar-tasting 3.9% ordinary bitter - not a beer I'm ever going to get excited about, but a half pint, well-kept, was fine to accompany our short visit. 

The toilets (complete with Hertha Berlin sticker on the cistern in the gents) are down some steep narrow stairs to the basement.  No 'mind your head' hazard on this one, but another set of stairs to take care on, especially if you've had a few Old Peculiars.

The original Cock, with it's tales of Samuel Pepys drinking there, was demolished to make way for the Bank of England, as was the neighbouring inn the Haunch of Venison.
The bank swatted aside this pair of taverns as they wanted a new branch to serve the law courts.  They commissioned architect Sir Arthur Blomfield to design a suitable eye-catching building, which was opened in 1888.
As with the Cock - excessive traffic and impatience = picture letdown.

The Old Bank of England (194 Fleet Street, Aldwych, London, EC4A 2LT)
The bank lasted until 1975, had a spell as a building society, then was restored and converted to a pub in 1994.
It does look rather splendid...

This was a Fuller's Ale & Pie house when I visited many years ago.  It's now under the control of Hertfordshire brewery McMullen's.

We opted for the AK original mild.  A beer which McMullen's have brewed continuously since 1827.  At 3.7%, it's at the lighter, less wintery, end of the scale of mild varieties, malty, smooth and easy to drink.

Gareth, the third member of our party, was making his way across the city to the Seven Stars, our next destination.
Which will have to wait for the next post, as this one's gotten far too long.
Thornbridge ales, more Sam Smiths, and the best staircase yet, to follow.

All Points East 2026

The August 2026 instalment of my annual standing in a park watching noisy bands series.  PropUptheBar was off to Victoria Park for the Outbreak day at All Points East.
But before frazzling my brain and making my ears ring, a few pubs and bars were in order.

My day started with 'Spoons - a line I should just cut and paste for 50% of the blog posts.

Goldengrove (146-148 The Grove, Stratford, E15 1NS)
This time in the heart of Stratford, the pub with a respectable hanging basket display and pavement seating where you can watch the multi-lane road junction.
This is a relatively early JDW, opened in 1993 as the chain was expanding throughout the capital.  It has graced the Good Beer Guide in the past, but coffee or Carlsberg was the order of the day from a decent midday Sunday crowd

The 'Cowcatcher' American pale from East London Brewing Co. was my pick.
A bit flat and dull, probably because of the lack of use the hand pump was getting, but drinkable and who am I to complain at £2.40 a pint in London.
The outdoor space to the back and side of the Goldengrove looked good, although I opted to sit inside and watch the coffee machine break down and people complaining about dirty cutlery.

When I wasn't taking really poor pictures of carpets and knees, I was tenuously sketching out a mini-crawl of Stratford pubs.  But this was instantly kyboshed when I walked to the GBG-listed Old Black Bull and found it closed in contradiction to opening hours online.
So I set my sights on Hackney Wick instead, under-taking the West Ham walk...

Hackney Wick was once an area of derelict factories and auto repair shops that few folks would have cause to come to.  It's changed a bit.
I visited Crate when it first opened here in 2012 with the smart new Olympic buildings having been constructed across the other side of the canal.  Fourteen years later, with the West Ham crowds descending each matchday and general gentrification demanding old run down areas have brewery taps and cool bars, Hackney Wick is alive with colourful graffiti and hipster vibes.

Crate looked busy, but just around the corner, Howling Hops was still getting going on a Sunday afternoon, a handful of folks outside, inside practically empty.

Howling Hops Tank Bar (Unit 9 Queens Yard, White Post Lane, Hackney Wick, E9 5EN)
Howling Hops began life in the cellar of Hackney's marvellous Cock Tavern in 2012.  They soon outgrew that space and moved three years later to the 'Wick, setting up in an old brick warehouse. 
The main bar is 10-meters long, beer poured direct from a run of 10 tanks lining the back of it.

I picked the Howling Hops 'Shadow Boxer', a 5.1% brown ale, other options including a sour, a Dortmunder pilsner and several varieties of tropical and hoppy pale ales.
You ideally need lots of folks on those long benches.  So, a little bit lacking in atmosphere on this occasion, but I did have a superb beer and I had Cedric Im Brookes belting out 'Give Rasta Glory' in the background, so all was fine.

A short walk past the station took me to the current Good Beer Guide entry, the taproom for online retailers Beer Merchants.

Beer Merchants Tap (99 Wallis Road, Hackney Wick, E9 5LN)
Opened in 2018, this is real world manifestation of the 'great beer to your door' website store.  
Where you get the opportunity to bust your budget perusing fridges full of cans and bottles to take away or drink in, as well as having plenty of stunning draft options from 20 keg lines. There are a couple of handpumps, just one of these in action on my visit, serving Beak 'Luma' table beer. 

At £7.25 a pint for a 3.5% hazy pale, I'd rapidly increased in beer cost since my start in Spoons.  But the beer was good, served in decent condition, with a pick of the quiet benches inside the old warehouse space, or a seat in the sunny yard outside.
I somehow resisted the temptation of the 16% imperial stout on draft.

I'd heartily recommend a visit to Beer Merchants.  A great beer list.  Possibly best tackled when you don't have a day at a music festival ahead of you.

There are plenty of other spots to eat and drink here, but none quite as stand-out colourful as the Lord Napier.

The Lord Napier (25 White Post Lane, Hackney Wick, Homerton, E9 5EN)
Go back in time and this pub would have served as a local for the factory workers when this bit of the city was a hive of industry.  What would those drinkers think if they could be transported into the future: seeing it full of hip young folk, painted colourfully, featuring a karaoke room and roof garden, with weird beer that costs an-arm-and-a-leg?  Not a lot, probably.
Opened in 1868, it spent most of it's years as an Ind Coope house.  It sat boarded-up and un-loved from 1995 until it was resurrected in 2021.
A Five Points pump clip was turned around, so I opted for the local Neckstamper 'Bluffer' on keg.

I'm glad I paid the Lord Napier a visit, but suspect I may have liked it more in the 1980s with a Double Diamond in front of me.

The nearby pedestrian flyover took me across the A2 and into Victoria Park, skirting the barriers which made up the back of the music festival site.
Gate opening times seemed a little too close to the first bands of the day and I didn't fancy shuffling through a big queue, hence the short diversion to a trad pub in the side-streets.

The Eleanor Arms (460 Old Ford Road, Bow, E3 5JP)
Being one of the closest pubs to Victoria Park, this was doing a roaring trade with festival goers, the old-boy propping up the end of the bar eying the invasion of blokes in black band t-shirts with suspicion.
It's a cracking old two-roomed pub with pool table in the back and a few surviving period features, including some lovely wood panelling.

Sadly, the influx of customers didn't mean they were racing through the barrels of real ale.  I ordered some Tayto crisps and an East London Brewing Co. 'Foundation' (the alternative being a Southwark 'Mayflower').  In ropey condition, almost in as poor a form as the Aston Villa team being hammered by Brighton on TV.

Right...let's get into that festival...

Through the gates remarkably easily with no queue, no phone mishaps retrieving my ticket, and nothing setting off the metal detectors.
I headed straight into the big tent to watch San Francisco blackgaze metallers Deafheaven.  

You'll be wanting to see a picture of Liam's son Gene Gallagher playing one of the smaller stages...

And you'll be wanting to see my favourite t-shirt of the day (although with something in the region of 3,000 Deftones shirts, competition was thin on the ground)...

And you'll be wanting to see the beer list...
If you weren't put off this festival by my mention of 'blackcore metallers', you will be once you see the beverage prices.

Much less 'craft' than what I'd gotten used to at Wide Awake festival for the past couple of years.  Madri possibly not 'excepcional' enough to warrent costing 5p short of eight quid.
At least there were a couple of interesting alternatives, the 'Space Hops' by Beyond Belief the one that caught my eye.

But...hells bells...that frothy head of indeterminate size within a cardboard cup is irritating when handing over £8.25 for a 'pint'.
Talking of hells bells, I was off to watch punk-rockers Amyl & the Sniffers who've been credited with taking the baton from AC/DC as Australia's prino heavy-riffin' rabble-rousers.

Yet I enjoyed old favourites Idles more.
A band I've now seen three times - each and every one of them in Victoria Park.  I'm led to believe they do play in other places.

I didn't catch nearly as many bands as I intended to, the heat and the swirling dust blowing up from what was once grass making it less appealing to be racing from one end of the site to the other.
The day ended watching Deftones from a distance, then a march to Mile End station and the painful Oxford Tube bus trip home.  At which point the pre-festival pub crawl seemed like a much more foolhardy idea than it had done at 11am.

Wandering Up Whitehall

Brief midday central London pub explorations en-route to a CAMRA day out in Maida Vale.
Yes, an unusually-wise short post featuring three half-pints in Good Beer Guide-listed pubs all within a few minutes of Trafalgar Square.
The Oxford Tube bus whisked me from Headington to Marble Arch remarkably swiftly on this occasion. My Oxford colleagues who'd opted for the train were entangled with the United massive ("yelllllows!") on the station platform on their way to a crunch game at Portsmouth.  All trains delayed - so just me in the capital early doors.
I opted to head right to Whitehall, remembering that London looks pretty spectacular when the sun is shining. 

I hadn't walked this street in years.
It's busy with tourists, police vans watching diligently for wrong un's, the neo-classical governmental buildings magnificent, the cluster of pubs at the top of the street looking inviting. 
It was the Old Shades that I headed to, a 2026 Beer Guide entry that I really couldn't decide whether I'd visited before or not.

The Old Shades (37 Whitehall, London, SW1A 2BX)
This is a Grade II listed building, the true magnificence of which you need to be across the other side of the road to witness.  I wasn't about to try and stand in the middle of Whitehall waiting for a gap in traffic and pedestrians for the perfect pub picture.
The current narrow gothic building was built in 1898 by Treadwell & Martin.  Wedged between souvenir shop and Italian café, the Old Shades is bigger than it looks once you step in - stretching back some distance and widening after the first few tables by the window.

It looks like a Prop Up the Bar exclusive visit has been arranged to ensure pictures without pesky customers... 

The cask range on the long majestic bar counter featured six hand pumps, playing it safe with beers folks have heard of and the two locals.
"Prices reflect the very central location", notes the CAMRA website description.  Uh-oh.

A Southwark 'LPA' for me, a crisp pale ale with a bitter kick. 
£3.50 for the half pint.
With the pick of the tables, I slipped into the curved leather-upholstered corner seat underneath the portrait of Churchill.  And marvelled this magnificent pub...

So, where was everyone?
Some were drawn to outdoor tables, basking in the sunshine outside The Clarence.  Some were tempted by advertisements for steak & ale pies at the Greene King Silver Cross, 
But most were bothering the Guardsmen at Horse Guards Parade...

Crikey, that's a lot of tourists.
I continued to Trafalgar Square and snapped my own tourist shot of Nelson on his column and Charles I on his horse.

In an enviable position in the corner of the square was pub number 2.
This building was originally built for the Union bank, designed in Italianate style by F.W. Porter and opened in 1871.  Turned into a Scottish restaurant in 2005, Fullers took over and opened it as a pub in 2014.

The Admiralty (66 Trafalgar Square, Charing Cross, London, WC2N 5DS)
Pre-noon drinking may be frowned upon in some quarters but it's all relative to what time you went to bed and what time you had breakfast, isn't it?
And it means you can make a fairly relaxed visit to The Admiralty before it gets inevitably rammed and the pickpockets begin their shifts.

'Jaipur' and 'ESB' perhaps a little stronger than I needed, Timothy Taylor 'Golden Best' lesser-seen than 'Landlord' or 'Boltmaker', but I steered towards the 'Pride'.  On reasonable, if not spectacular form with a price tag of £3.45 a half.
Most of the tables were adorned with 'reserved' signs, but I'd be long gone before "Vicky 1pm" arrived, hogging a large table with a prime view of the impressively decorated pub.
It's that mezzanine that is the icing on the cake...

You need to descend the spiral staircase to the basement to reach the loos.
That basement - refurbished after a big fire in 2022 - was a warren of booths within pillars and vaulted ceilings: the Gunwhale bar situated in the depths amongst nautical decor.

I had time for one more swift half before I needed to be elsewhere in the capital.
Plentiful options within easy reach of Trafalgar Square.  I decided to make a revisit to The Harp...after all, what right-minded soul could walk past this...

The Harp (47 Chandos Place, Charing Cross, London, WC2N 4HS)
Stained glass windows, budding flower basket display, outdoor vertical drinkers...
This is a central London pub with a deserved good reputation.
The first recorded mention of the pub was in 1805 when it was known as the 'Welsh Harp'.  It's a now a Fullers pub operating as a free house, providing a vastly different (and hard to pick from) range of cask than the Admiralty.
Ten hand pumps offering both familiar and more unusual ales.  I fancied veering to the dark side, so ordered the fantastic Downlands Brewery 'Oatmeal Stout'.

One day I'll do justice to the collection of classic central London pubs.
And find the most daunting steep staircase up or down to the WCs.
In the meantime, The Harp makes its case for an inclusion on that list - I wouldn't want to try taking these two steps at a time after five pints of beer...

But right now I was navigating them safely and leaving the heart of the city behind to catch the Bakerloo Line to Maida Vale.
More waffle and some half-decent pictures from there in the next post.